


before something breaks that cannot be fixed

by cascrane (thunder_and_stars)



Series: a dream deferred [3]
Category: no sleep in the city of dreams
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-12
Updated: 2021-01-12
Packaged: 2021-03-17 06:42:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28720683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thunder_and_stars/pseuds/cascrane
Summary: jack lancaster is six, and he has never cared about anything as much as this.jack is fourteen, and he still wears his baseball cap everywhere, not that he plays baseball.jack is ten, and he's chasing his sister down the boardwalk.jack is 21, not ten, and he is jackal, not jack, and leah is gone.
Series: a dream deferred [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2105190





	before something breaks that cannot be fixed

jack lancaster is six, and he has never cared about anything as much as this. leah, who is only eight, with a sunshine smile to match his gap toothed grin, and raven, turning ten in two weeks, are sitting next to him at the big oak table in the asperne house.

there’s a war starting, raven says. jack isn’t sure what a war is, but it seems bad. their parents are always busy.

except today.

today, jack’s mom sits across the table from them, right beside raven’s uncle alex. 

today, they get to learn magic.

jack’s mom has soft auburn hair and a teasing smile, pale freckles sprayed across her nose and cheeks, and she is the best mother jack could ask for. she smells like crackling fire and old books, and she always has the best stories.

alex has light brown hair and amber eyes, with a smile like honey. he is still trying to teach jack sign language, which raven is wickedly good at, like it comes so simply to her. even leah is great at it, nimble and fast and happy.

raven leans over from where she sits to whisper something to leah. the younger girl’s blue eyes light up, and she throws her head back laughing, red curls tumbling down the back of her blue hoodie.

jack has a bright blue baseball cap perched on his head. it’s far too big for him, but leah and his dad got it for him, and it is emblazoned with the logo of the brooklyn cyclones, which jack has always liked better than major league baseball. the hat tips over his eyes, and he loves it more than anything else he owns.

and today, jack is excited. he pokes at the gap left by his missing front teeth with the tip of his tongue and leans closer to leah as their mom slides a book across the table to them.

it is large and old and heavy, and the cover has a lot of big words that jackal doesn’t understand, but he catches the word  _ magickal _ towards the end, which is why they’re here.

jack’s mom talks them through the first two pages of the book, saying everything aloud so jack can repeat the words he doesn’t understand. raven and leah tease him in the way they always do, warm and sisterly, and he tries to follow the spell on the pages.

leah’s hands cover his, warm and rough from climbing absolutely everything in reach, helping move his fingers to the right positions.

“like this?” he asks, tongue poking out the corner of his mouth as he concentrates, squinting as the book.

“like the q,” raven says, leaning onto the table to demonstrate the sign, fingers crossed, and then shows it with her hands pressed together, palms out.

jack mimics the sign, and leah smiles.

“you’re getting good,” she tells him, and he positively beams. their mother nods from across the table.

“now,” his mom instructs, “hands down and apart.”

he follows the directions, and the table under his hands shimmers and shows an image of trees.

“whoa,” jack says. leah holds her hand up for a high five. fire dances on her fingertips.

the image flickers and fades, but his mom assures him that it’s fine. the adults dismiss the kids to run off, and they end up in the kitchen, jack standing on a chair and raven supervising as they make cookies.

(every single cookie is burned, but it doesn’t matter.)

leah ends up in the tree in the backyard, smiling down at them as raven hauls jack onto her shoulders.

(jack knows that leah is his sister, and raven is his friend, but sometimes, he thinks they’re both his sisters. his dad always said family was what you make it, whatever that meant.)

(jack thinks it means that his family is a whole lot bigger than just the people who live in his house with him.)

(he loves his family.)

and then it shifts. 

jack is fourteen, and he still wears his baseball cap everywhere, not that he plays baseball. leah plays baseball.

jack lancaster is a dancer, these days. he is currently on his way to the school he performs with, to get ready for the show tonight. leah hands him his bag and wishes him luck as he stumbles to the door, still trying to pull his shoes on.

toby yells something at him from the counter, then chases after him with mismatched sneakers tied on his feet. (jack is pretty sure the yellow one is anna’s and the red one is actually toby’s.)

toby is only eight, but he’s inherited the same sunshine smile as leah. anna, who is nine, and has their mother’s curly hair like leah, climbs onto jack’s back to hug him.

“g’luck,” she mumbles through many missing teeth, and he smiles. she’s the calmest of them all, but he knows she’ll be yelling right alongside toby at the show.

leah picks anna up and places her on a chair. 

eliot lancaster, their grandfather and now their guardian, waits by the door.

“you’re going to do great. we’ll be there at the show, okay?” he says. jack smiles.

“see you there. love you guys,” he calls back into the house.

(he never leaves without saying he loves them. it’s a habit, now, ever since they lost their parents.)

toby follows him onto the street, running in circles around jack.

“hey, jacky?” he asks. 

“yeah, toby?”

“you’re still gonna teach me and anna the spell tonight, right?” he asks. jack smiles and nods.

“of course, toby. now, head on back. i’ll see you at the show,” jack says.

toby smiles wide, then runs back to the door of their home, where their grandfather is still waiting.

jack walks the rest of the two miles to the dance studio -- he likes the walk, likes clearing his head. the others all take the bus.

he settles into the room with the rest of his class, about ten of them in total. two hours pass quickly, and when the performance starts, he feels fluid and free in the way dances always feels.

except, when he looks out into the crowd, he can’t see leah and the little ones with their red hair and bright grins, and he can’t hear his younger siblings cheering so loud like they always do.

he isn’t supposed to be in most of the show, and he leaves the stage with two of the other kids, james and natalia. nat offers him some vague placations about how their parents never show up, how it sucks, how they’re probably just late.

before he can say anything, there is a horribly sharp pain in his chest and his skull, and he stumbles and sinks against a wall.

something is very, very wrong.

_ dany?  _ he asks in his head.  _ what happened? _

but there’s nothing. dany has always been there. she’s never  _ not there _ . he can’t sense her any more though, and the pain that lances through his body feels the same as it did seven years ago, when his parents died, except far, far worse.

jack can’t do anything. he grabs his bag, and he runs.

he can’t look back. the dark sidewalk he runs down melts into a boardwalk on a grey-skyed day.

leah is twelve, and has the longest hair of the three of them even though it barely brushes her shoulders as she sprints down the boardwalk at top speed, shoes thrown in the sand and forgotten like it isn't 40 degrees out.

raven, who is fourteen and has been watching the lancaster siblings for four years now, should be old enough to be exasperated with them, but isn't. she smiles and laughs right with them as she and jack, who is only ten with a bright spark in his grey-blue eyes, chase leah down the boardwalk.

jack has also lost his shoes, though his are looped over the rail somewhere now far behind them. leah veers off the boardwalk across the sand, and yells loudly to those trailing her as she slides her way across the beach, sand spraying up behind her.

it's cold enough that the beaches of rockaway are as empty as most of the streets. they've only seen three other people in the past hour, and two of them were working at the restaurant on the boardwalk.

"come on, jack!" leah yells to her brother, slowing as she nears the water. 

raven grabs jack's shirt to keep him from jumping over the railing into the sand below -- it's a twelve foot drop, easily. it wouldn't kill him, or probably even hurt him, but he doesn't need any more bad ideas in his head.

they join leah at the waters edge, where she pulls off her sweatshirt and dumps it ungracefully in the sand. she's wearing shorts and a t-shirt now, and jack stands beside her in a t-shirt and jeans. he dumps his baseball cap that he never goes anywhere without on the sand with her hoodie.

they both maintain that it's not cold, and even getting leah to wear the sweatshirt was a struggle for the adults who eventually gave up and let raven take the kids out to rockaway. the train ride was nice, and the walk along the water was peaceful -- as peaceful as anything ever was, with the three of them.

leah, who jack loves not only because she is his older sister but also because she is the master of awful ideas, which he's quickly learning to come up with on his own. before raven can protest -- not that she really would -- leah runs straight into the water, screaming all the while.

her teeth chatter from the cold as she flashes a huge grin back to the others, who follow her in with little hesitation. jack, who doesn't seem to remember that they do have to take a train home and he is still fully dressed, runs straight to where leah is standing, water lapping at the hem of her shirt and small waves tumbling into her back.

as he reaches her, he tackles her into the water, letting the ice flow across them and shock all the bad memories out of their systems. (leah hasn't been able to go to a beach in the summer without crying for three years.) 

they both come up sputtering and shivering, water sluicing down their backs from their dark rust-red hair. raven wades calmly over to them and smiles.

"you're both idiots," she tells them. leah meets her gaze with a grin like sunshine. 

jack is now missing two teeth on the top left side of his mouth, and when he smiles, he looks even younger than he is, bright eyes and bright hair and a childish happiness he didn't have for the two years after the war. (raven calls those years the bad times, and he's tempted to agree.)

"you should join us," jack says, voice edging on childish pleading.

"no," raven says, but she doesn't protest as jack grabs her hands and starts pulling, or as leah jumps onto her back and clings there like a limpet, saltwater soaking into her clothes.

as predicted by raven -- who jack doesn't like to listen to when she tries to be practical, because being practical is far less fun than being "recklessly stupid," which is what raven calls the two redheads -- the train ride home is an experience to say the least. 

jack's jeans are still soaked and caked with now-damp sand all the way to his knees, and his shoes are tied together by the laces and looped around his neck so they hang against his chest. he sits barefoot on subway, water pooling onto the plastic seat from his clothes and dripping onto the floor under him.

leah decided to put her sweater on immediately after getting out of the water, which only got the sweater soaked like the rest of her clothes, and she could only find one of her shoes when she went to find them, so her left foot is simply clad in a sandy, wet, rainbow sock.

raven had wrestled the two of them into the public bathroom to try to dry their clothes out with the hand dryers, which didn't work particularly well, but did warm them up enough to not get hypothermia. 

the train rattles to a stop at their station, and leah grabs jack's hand in one and raven's in the other as they walk off the train, old enough to know the things they've done are stupid but not yet old enough to not do them.

jackal smiles as leah helps lead him around all the broken glass on the street, her hand warm in his.

suddenly, it's so cold.

there's only darkness. 

jack is 21, not ten, and he is jackal, not jack, and leah is gone. (his sister is dead.)

leah has been gone for seven years now. (that's so long. too long.)

jackal is stuck, and his city is  _ dying _ , and he can't do anything.

he's alone.


End file.
